Lots of musicians write songs inspired by their adventures on the road, but few bands have gathered material as harrowing and vivid as Aphrodesia, an 11-piece San Francisco ensemble that made a West African pilgrimage to the club built by Afrobeat patriarch Fela Anikulapo Kuti.
The band's odyssey is the subject of its compelling new album, "Lagos By Bus," a polyglot account of a perilous but ultimately triumphant trip from Ghana to Nigeria. Aphrodesia celebrates the release of the CD on Friday at the Independent in San Francisco, headlining a show that includes the Bay Area Balkan ensemble Brass Menazeri.
Part of an international movement that has flourished since Fela's death from AIDS a decade ago, Aphrodesia had arrived in Ghana in February 2006 with the vague hope of traveling to Nigeria's capital, Lagos. A chance encounter put them in touch with Fela's son, bandleader, saxophonist and Afrobeat standard-bearer Femi Kuti. Against all odds, the band made it to the Shrine and rocked the club, the first time a Western combo had brought Fela's funk-driven Afrobeat sound back to the source.
"We were all exhausted from trying to cross the border all day, dealing with armed soldiers in our face, snatching our passports and looking for bribes," bassist Ezra Gale says. "We're looking out at this crowd of 400 Nigerians standing there with their arms folded, looking back at us like, 'OK white people, let's see what you got.' Three or four songs into our set,
Femi came out and played with us, and that was the stamp of approval. Once that happened, everyone was up and dancing, and the rest of the night it was a big party."
The band recounts the chaos and anxiety of the border-crossing experience on the hard-driving song "Bus Driver," which includes ambient sound recorded during the encounter. The lyric of another tune, "Holy Ghost Invasion," is drawn entirely from signs they saw during their stay in Lagos (a detailed account of the Africa trip can be found on the band's Web site, www.aphrodesia.org). "Anybody who's been to West Africa knows they have a really localized version of Christianity," Gale says. "Everywhere we looked there were signs like 'God Is Here Beauty Salon,' or 'All You Have Is All You Need Groceries.' We wrote down a bunch and turned it into a song."
Founded by Gale and vocalist Lara Maykovich in 2003, Aphrodesia has honed its own particular take on the Afrobeat sound, incorporating influences far beyond the original blend of insistent James Brown funk and West African polyrhythms. Maykovich studied Shona thumb piano while living in Zimbabwe, and she brings the incantatory patterns of m'bira into Aphrodesia's mix of Afro-Caribbean, reggae and hip-hop grooves.
Jazz also figures prominently in Aphrodesia's sound, as the band is stocked with potent improvisers such as saxophonists Mitch Marcus and Sylain Carton, founding members of the wildly inventive ensemble Japonize Elephants. But it's the crunching, horn-laden approach, founded by Fela, that forms the bedrock of Aphrodesia's style, just as his outspoken politics mesh with the band's sense of mission.
Jailed and beaten repeatedly for his scathing denunciations of the corruption of Nigeria's military governments, Fela left a politically charged legacy that many Afrobeat bands have embraced. Aphrodesia first gained widespread attention in 2004's "Just Vote Tour," a cross-country voter registration drive in a bus powered by vegetable oil.
"We never sat down and said, OK, we need to be a political band," Gale says. "It flows out of who we are as people and how the music speaks to us. Which isn't to say you couldn't write a silly Afrobeat pop song. I'm sure you could, and I reserve the right to do that. But so far, the grooves and the politics really lend themselves to each other."
Gale came to Afrobeat after immersing himself in jazz, particularly the early 1970s fusion of Miles Davis. He explored the style in Bitches Brew, a sprawling band that played an important role in the Bay Area's mid-1990s acid jazz scene. He and Maykovich first connected about seven years ago in the Afro-Cuban band Mas Cabeza.
Raised in Harrisburg, Pa., Maykovich attended the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo., and then spent 1997 and '98 in Africa, where she studied and performed with members of Akrowa Dance Ensemble of Ghana, and the National Music and Dance Company of Zimbabwe. When she returned to Boulder, she became lead vocalist for the Motet, and eventually founded her own band, Being Lara Maykovich, a project steeped in Afro-Cuban and African grooves.
"I always related to rhythm-based music, and African music is so inviting and inclusive," Maykovich says. "Its nature and purpose is to bring people together, which is why I feel that it's such a gateway to creating new forms. I love that Afrobeat was a fusion of funk and African rhythms, and the idea that it allowed a lot of expansion and experimentation because of its nature as a mixing and gathering."
By Andrew Gilbert
12/20/07 >> 
